The image size limit has been raised to 1mb! Anything larger than that should be linked to. This is a HARD limit, please do not abuse it.

Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.

Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!

I see no difference beetween his belief and that of any other religious person and I don't go around smacking people upside the head

Those beliefs have, through time and historical accident, gained a certain amount of acceptability. Depending on your inclination, this is somewhat unfortunate.

But you don't make the situation better by throwing up your hands and deciding to accord every idiotic belief respect and equal time. You definitely don't want to expand the idiocy privilege any wider than you have to; you want to keep cracking down on that shit.

"Everybody has the right to worship their crystal alien gods, man" is a recipe for stupidity.

but why?

Crack down on the blatant criminals and money hucksters... but so long as what a person believes doesn't pick your pocket or cause you harm, why does it fucking matter aside from your inherent desire to show them the wrongness of their ways?

Listen, I don't know if you have noticed, but there is a lot of fucking ignorance in the world.

It is mostly a crazy ignorant place!

So I am advocating cracking down on that shit anywhere you can get away with it. It is socially acceptable to mock the idiocy of believing in Lizard People from the Center of the Earth.

It is not currently (universally) socially acceptable to mock the idiocy of Sarah Palin's belief that the Great Sky Beard means Global Warming can't be a threat.

So flip it around; why would extending the "oh your beliefs are a special unique snowflake" privilege to the Lizard People believers make the world a better place, instead of a place even more over-run with people whose heads are so far up their asses they can see Russia from the lungs?

honest answer: I'm optimistic enough to think that it gets better slowly and I don't think it would matter what I do so I'd rather just not champion a cause

I mean if I talk to someone about religion then I won't be all "yes yes this all sounds good" but there's no reason to get vicious about it

Sleight of hand requires no particular technology. The only difference is that people now understand that words or thoughts alone cannot create, destroy, or redirect any form mass or energy. So they will categorically reject any act of magic as trickery. 2000 years ago this was not the case. I don't understand what causes people not to take this realization and question a lot of the events in the bible which were crucial in the formation of their faith.

This is literally how I became an atheist. At a young age I realized that people thousands of years ago were wildly unreliable witnesses to events, even if their observations survived perfectly translated and unbiased to today (which also is not true, but is a slightly weaker, more deniable point).

Putin would be the kind of person you wouldn't want to tell a joke around, because you don't know if he's laughing at the joke, or laughing at the thought of what he's going to have happen to you later.

I remember going to Sunday school back in the day. I think my mom just gave up forcing us to wake up and get dressed for any kind of mass, and we stopped altogether before it got ingrained. I don't remember ever actually believing, even back then. Like, I remember bullshiting my Sunday school teacher.

It's unrealistic to expect that effective techniques for performing science will be at all effective for promoting science; in fact, we have ample evidence that trying to promote science via reasoned engagement doesn't work very well. Anti-scientific proponents of vaccine-avoidance or evolution-denial continue to gain the mindshare of a significant and powerful segment of the voting population that "better evidence" has been unable to sway.

You have to be willing to also be the side that shouts louder and takes the cheap shots; these are time-tested, evidence-based methods for effectively capturing peoples attention. They are 100% science-backed promotional methods that the pro-science crowd, perversely, rejects.

And that's a deeply un-scientific attitude. Many, many people believe what they hear first and what gets shouted loudest. Not liking that fact, and therefore refusing to engage in those tactics, doesn't make it any less true; it simply cedes a large segment of the population to anti-science proponents who are willing to do what it takes to get their message heard.

A classic eyeballing from a 2009 energy dispute. Bulgarian prime minister Boiko Borissov is startled into silence as images climb unbidden into his consciousness: an icy wasteland, bodies in pits, and a suddenly cut-off scream in the darkness

I remember going to Sunday school back in the day. I think my mom just gave up forcing us to wake up and get dressed for any kind of mass, and we stopped altogether before it got ingrained. I don't remember ever actually believing, even back then. Like, I remember bullshiting my Sunday school teacher.

And the ‘well that’s just they’re opinion man, leave them be’ – leads to the simpering mess that is the democratic party.

Sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office there was a vaccinate your child commercial. Infants of dying of whooping cough. WHOOPING COUGH. That's the kind of illness that was rendered pretty much a silly name and now it's killing people. I'm glad my sister is siding with medical science for her kid, because not too long ago that's the kind of thing she'd latch onto.

It's unrealistic to expect that effective techniques for performing science will be at all effective for promoting science; in fact, we have ample evidence that trying to promote science via reasoned engagement doesn't work very well. Anti-scientific proponents of vaccine-avoidance or evolution-denial continue to gain the mindshare of a significant and powerful segment of the voting population that "better evidence" has been unable to sway.

You have to be willing to also be the side that shouts louder and takes the cheap shots; these are time-tested, evidence-based methods for effectively capturing peoples attention. They are 100% science-backed promotional methods that the pro-science crowd, perversely, rejects.

And that's a deeply un-scientific attitude. Many, many people believe what they hear first and what gets shouted loudest. Not liking that fact, and therefore refusing to engage in those tactics, doesn't make it any less true; it simply cedes a large segment of the population to anti-science proponents who are willing to do what it takes to get their message heard.

I think the pro-science crowd, when rejecting those methods, is doing so with a long-term goal in mind.

Those methods work because people are generally poorly educated and reactionary. I would think that continuing those methods just because they work right now would reinforce the behavior that they'd rather discourage.